Professor Sir Graham Hills - obituary

Professor Sir Graham Hills was a visionary vice-chancellor who planned a
university for Scotland’s Highlands

Professor Sir Graham Hills, who has died aged 87, was a physical chemist and proposed the creation of one of Britain’s remotest universities.

He gained experience in university administration between 1980 and 1991, when, as principal and vice-chancellor of Strathclyde University, he responded to cuts in the higher education budget by developing business partnerships which brought in new sources of income.

Then, in 1992, he proposed that a federation of 13 existing remote further-education colleges become a University for the Highlands and Islands. The university’s central core would be tiny — a concept which became known as the “Polo-mint” model. Among other recommendations, he suggested IT-based distance learning to benefit a large but sparsely populated area of Britain.

The model won the backing of local authorities, enterprise bodies and the Scottish Office, and even persuaded the Millennium Commission to depart from its decreed policy of not supporting educational projects to award a grant of more than £33 million. Within a decade, the UHI Millennium Institute had been established and, after a further decade, the federation did indeed gain university status.

The new university now has 7,000 students on 13 campuses and is regarded as one of the most important projects in the Highlands and Islands for a generation. Yet it has been plagued by difficulties, including one of the highest dropout rates (a third of students in 2012) of any British university.

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In an article in the Herald newspaper in 2000, Hills expressed “dismay” that key features of his original vision had been “surreptitiously watered down and effectively abandoned”. In particular, he felt that centralising pressures had turned “a constructive partnership of independent institutions into a kind of command economy”, eroding links between individual colleges and local communities, and causing colleges to lose “either the ability or the will to support each other’s courses and students through the expensive and sophisticated computer networks which were at the heart of the UHI concept”.

In UHI: The Making of a University (2004, written with Robin Lingard), Hills provided an account of the efforts to found the new university and a commentary on the problems facing those who seek to innovate within British higher education.

Graham John Hills was born at Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, on April 9 1926. He won a scholarship to the local grammar school but left with the equivalent of O-levels. His family were bombed out of their home during the Second World War and Graham had to take work as a laboratory assistant at the chemical firm May and Baker.

Developing an interest in chemistry, he enrolled as a part-time student at Birkbeck College, where he graduated in Chemistry in 1946 and stayed on to take a doctorate.

He went on to take up a post as a lecturer at Imperial College in 1949, moving in 1962 to a chair in Physical Chemistry at Southampton University, where he remained for 18 years, serving as dean of science and deputy vice-chancellor of the university.

His scientific specialism was electrochemistry, a subject on which he wrote or edited several books, including Some aspects of the electrochemistry of solutions (1975) and Electrochemistry (1977).

But it was his reputation as an academic manager and leader that commended him to Strathclyde University in 1980 when they were looking for a replacement for the principal, Sir Sam Curran.

Hills was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and served on many advisory bodies, including as the BBC’s National Governor for Scotland from 1989 to 1994. He was knighted in 1988.

He married, in 1950, Brenda Stubbington, who died in 1974, and secondly, in 1980, Mary McNaughton, who died last year. He is survived by the son and three daughters of his first marriage.